Sooo... can anyone tell me how to make a hair change shape with the Sim’s weight? I’m converting an adult base game hair for child now, and it doesn’t morph. I suppose that doesn’t matter too much for children because they don’t seem to get as fat as adults and don’t have breasts, but in general, when making hairs, should you try to get them to morph or not?

Second question (I didn’t want to double post): How much animation detail is generally considered necessary for hair LODs? The base game hair I mentioned above has a lot of complex bone assignments, and when I shrunk the mesh to make the LODs, I lost them. Should I bother trying to recreate the original animation for the LODs given that people very seldom see them and they look really bad anyway?

The first question's answer will depend on whether you're using TSRW or DABOOBS to make the hair.

For the second question.. depends which LOD. Looking at EA LODs is a good place to start. Depending on how complex your LOD0 is, you might be able to use it for the LOD1. If it's a reasonably poly'd hair then that should be fine: the LOD1 does need to animate nicely, as that's the one most people will see most of the time. LOD2 still needs to be recognisable, but doesn't have to have pretty animations or stand up to close inspection. LOD3 can basically just be a blob.

I dont know about DABOOBS but TSRW includes all the morphs so you could prolly use the adult fat morphstate(make it fit the child fat face/head)

You also can use the adult boneassignements, they normally stay assigned, no idea why you lost them.
If it a long hair however you might need to update the breast bones, children dont have that joint.

Doh, I should have said I'm using DABOOBS. Must remember to mention that in future.

Thanks, Whiterider. So, the LOD1 has to look good. *Takes notes* The EA LOD0 has 5000 polys; d'you think that'd be all right as a LOD1? What would you say was the upper limit?

Bloom: you lose the bone assignments when you shrink the mesh with the DirectX tools in Milkshape. (Or, if there's a way of keeping them, I don't know what it is...) Thank you for the advice re: the breast bones; this mesh isn't assigned to them, but I'll keep it in mind for future projects.

I did write a small tutorial but it doesn't always work

http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=429672

You basicly weld the the high and lower lods together with the high lod as reference
Not sure this will work on double layered hairs

IT WORKED!!! Sorry if I sound overexcited, Bloom, but this failed about the first five times; I carried on experimenting with different sizes and found that if I scaled up the mesh x1000, instead of 10,000, it would do what you said it did.

This is amazing! I've got my LOD1 now with all the bones assigned and a sensible poly count. Am I right in thinking this method could even be used to transfer EA bone assignments to custom or Sims 2 hair, provided the two hairstyles used were similar enough? That would definitely be quicker than assigning them all by hand!

sweet, unfortunate the direct x tool infects the vertice position when scaling that big.
When the verts no longer match the vertice position of the high lod it fails.
So i might have to update the tutorial(less scaling)


The welding(transferring bones) is only possible with identical vertice positions so not sure wat you mean by assigning defaults assigtnements to custom hair.
For converting sims 2 meshes to sims 3 you best use my template here:
http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=407561

The vertex positions have to be identical? Ah, so much for that idea, then. It's still incredibly useful even as it is, though; thank you!